1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and more specifically to a system and method of converting graphical call flows into finite state machines.
2. Introduction
A spoken dialog system is typically represented by a call flow. The call flow is essentially a graph or network, possibly containing cycles over parts of the network. The incorporated application above discloses a rooted tree having a root node, descendent nodes, and leaf nodes. A path from the root node to a leaf node represents a specific dialog. A call flow can contain huge (tens of thousands) or even unbounded numbers of unique dialogs.
Typically, a spoken dialog developer will manually inspect the call flow to generate dialog test cases and scenarios for testing the spoken dialog system. This is a time consuming process and is prone to error. This translation, if done by hand, is prone to error, misinterpretation, and can be time and resource time consuming. What is needed is a system and method for converting the call flow into another representation that is useful for implementing the call flow in a spoken dialog service and useful for testing the implemented spoken dialog service.